Daily Recap — April 25

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Actual Obstruction

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To listen to the mainstream media, one would get the impression that no one had ever gotten involved in American elections before; that the world was comprised of perfectly-behaved neighbors just minding their own business before big bad Trump came along to hatch a nefarious, treasonous plot with Hackin’ Vlad Putin.

Anyone who has followed this sort of thing more than a day knew that to be nonsense, as nary an election has gone by since the end of WWII without foreign meddling in some form or another, sometimes by our own CIA abroad. Welp, now that the Russia smoke has cleared, the truth is emerging. It turns out the #PutinGate narrative was but a mere distraction while the real meddling was happening elsewhere — like Ukraine, for instance.

The Ukrainian equivalent of an Attorney General revealed yesterday that an investigation has been opened into whether Ukraine’s law enforcement apparatus intentionally leaked financial records during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign about then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, all in the service of electing Hillary Clinton, of course.

Taken from a report by John Solomon:

The leak of the so-called black ledger files to U.S. media prompted Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign and gave rise to one of the key allegations in the Russia collusion probe that has dogged Trump for the last two and a half years.

Ukraine Prosecutor General Yurii Lutsenko’s probe was prompted by a Ukrainian parliamentarian’s release of a tape recording purporting to quote a top law enforcement official as saying his agency leaked the Manafort financial records to help Clinton’s campaign.

The parliamentarian also secured a court ruling that the leak amounted to “an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign,” Lutsenko told me. Lutsenko said the tape recording is a serious enough allegation to warrant opening a probe, and one of his concerns is that the Ukrainian law enforcement agency involved had frequent contact with the Obama administration’s U.S. Embassy in Kiev at the time.

“Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment of this information,” Lutsenko told me.

Solomon goes on to outline some of the possible connections between Ukranian officials and the very people who tried to bring down PDT starting 2016 and going well into his presidency:

Furthermore, the mystery of how the Manafort black ledger files got leaked to American media has never been solved. They surfaced two years after the FBI investigated Manafort over his Ukraine business activities but declined to move forward in 2014 for lack of evidence.

We now have strong evidence that retired British spy Christopher Steele began his quest in what ultimately became the infamous Russia collusion dossier with a series of conversations with top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr between December 2015 and February 2016 about securing evidence against Manafort.

We know the FBI set up shop in the U.S. embassy in Kiev to assist its Ukraine–Manafort inquiry — a common practice on foreign-based probes — while using Steele as an informant at the start of its Russia probe. And we know Clinton’s campaign was using a law firm to pay an opposition research firm for Steele’s work in an effort to stop Trump from winning the presidency, at the same time Steele was aiding the FBI.

Those intersections, coupled with the new allegations by Ukraine’s top prosecutor, are reason enough to warrant a serious, thorough investigation.

If Ukraine law enforcement figures who worked frequently with the U.S. Embassy did leak the Manafort documents in an effort to influence the American election for Clinton, the public deserves to know who knew what, and when.

In addition to this, it seems that the Obama-appointed ambassador to Ukraine had a very seedy relationship with the very people who were tasked with fighting corruption within Ukraine’s borders, to the point that Team Obama gave the office a list of people who were “hands off” in terms of corruption probes. Lutsenko also claims that an investigation into the misuse of U.S. aid in Ukraine was met with a complete lack of cooperation from our side.

It’s pretty odd for a country not to want to investigate the misuse of its own funds, doncha think?

Lutsenko provided documentary evidence to Solomon to support his claim, namely a letter from the embassy, showing that a U.S. official indeed asked him to stand down on the misappropriation-of-funds case.

For its part, the U.S. State Department responded to the accusation by saying that it no longer financially supports Lutsenko’s office in its anti-corruption mission and considers his allegation about the do-not-prosecute list “an outright fabrication.”

While a smoking gun in the form of the do-not-prosecute list has yet to surface, the letter recovered by Solomon does spell out plainly that the embassy did not want the investigation to go forward. The man who sent it, George P. Kent, says plainly, “We are gravely concerned about this investigation for which we see no basis.”

Again, it’s rather odd that a country would be so averse to an investigation into the misuse of its own money.

That little piece of obstruction isn’t the only thing turning heads in regards to Ukraine, however. Solomon goes on to detail an issue with the Ambassador to Ukraine at the time, who appeared not to be on America’s team so long as Donald J. Trump was in charge of it:

Last year, when he served as House Rules Committee chairman, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) wrote a private letter asking Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to recall the current U.S. ambassador, alleging that she made disparaging statements about President Trump.

The ambassador “has spoken privately and repeatedly about her disdain for the current administration in a way that might call for the expulsion” of America’s top diplomat in Ukraine, Sessions wrote.

When an ambassador becomes such an issue that a congressman writes the Secretary of State demanding her removal, that is an issue indeed.

These troubling bits of info demand answers. Unlike the travesty known as the Mueller probe, there is probable cause to find out what exactly has been happening in Ukraine, especially as it relates to the 2016 election. It’s no secret that Trump’s Russia-friendly banter raised some alarms in the former Soviet member back during 2016. Now, the question is exactly how far they went to ensure he would lose, and who in the Obama administration knew about it.

This is but one more string to be tugged until the entire scheme unravels.